fluktor -|||- study - office - newsletter October 22, 2005

Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2005
China as a gallery of contrasts
*The conventional and the cutting-edge jostle for prominence as art spins off an exploding culture.
By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer

Beijing — The first of two articles on the burgeoning art scene in China.

An enormous bald fiberglass nude by Chinese sculptor Xiang Jing sits heavily on a pink bench in a room of her own, staring glumly into space. Smaller, life-size figures lined up in an adjacent space at China Art Seasons gallery seem to be gripped by anxiety. Petulant, grim or wary, they are on the move but lost in some internal crisis. One young woman sticks two fingers in her mouth, as if stifling a scream. In another work, three dark-suited figures merge into a bundle of nervous energy.

This is contemporary art in China, or at least one aspect of it.

In the capital of China, where a new Great Wall of high-rise apartments encircles the city and billboards advertise Western-style residential developments called Napa Valley, Upper East Side and Vancouver Forest, the contemporary art scene reflects the dynamic, weirdly conflicted side of life here. Overseas investors and newly rich Chinese fund more and more trendy galleries. Brand-new artworks depicting subjects that would have been banned a few decades ago sell for tens of thousands of dollars — and much more at auction a few years later. Jet-setting artists with lots of studio assistants own fashionable restaurants and send their children to private schools.

"The speed of the economy brings opportunities for artists," said Li Guosheng, a Chinese businessman who opened Chinablue Gallery in Beijing three years ago and has engaged superstar artist Ai Wei Wei to design his second commercial outlet for Chinese contemporary art. "The artists' success is comparable to economic growth in China."

But Beijing is also a city of sharp contrasts between rich and poor, old and new, government control and free enterprise. The art scene reflects that divergence as well, and never more so than this fall. The Beijing International Art Biennale, an enormous state-sponsored exhibition at the Millennium Monument Art Museum and the National Art Museum, is billed as "the largest international art gathering ever held in China." But it's merely a backdrop for a batch of far more adventurous shows in independent galleries.

Despite stunning growth in Shanghai and other cities in China, Beijing remains the nation's cultural center and hub of art production. But it didn't launch its Biennale until 2003 — long after such international extravaganzas popped up in other cities around the world — and the show doesn't follow the art world model. The organizers seem to have no interest in promoting Beijing as a place to see forward-looking art. A statement posted at the two museums and printed in the Biennale catalog explains that the art was chosen to illustrate "humanistic concerns" and encourage "harmony between art and the public, harmony between people and harmony between man and nature."

Assembled by a committee to end all committees — composed of 58 directors, curators, advisors and coordinators working in consultation with a host of embassies and art organizations — the exhibition represents 462 artists from 69 countries in a public display of openness. But it's almost entirely restricted to painting and sculpture, excluding the photography, video, new media and installation preferred by many young artists.

The result is a mélange of traditional art and reworkings of modern styles, lightly sprinkled with works by leading avant-garde Chinese artists and teachers, such as Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, and internationally renowned figures including German painters Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. In an apparent attempt to cover all bases, the organizers added small shows of contemporary art from Italy, Russia and Uzbekistan; a roundup of French Impressionist prints; a spotty survey of European and American art called "From Ingres to Warhol"; and a tribute to the late traditional Chinese painter Huang Zhou, on view in adjacent rooms.

"It's a very strange show, but very Chinese," said Yu, whose painting "She — A Peasant in the Suburbs" looks rather out of place in such conventional company. Part of a series of diptychs on Chinese women, it pairs an image of an elderly woman working out on an exercise machine with a portrayal of her fully dressed but up to her waist in water. "I hoped they would choose one of my new works," Yu said, "but they took the same painting that was at the Shanghai Biennale last year."

Dismissed as an academic exercise

While many artists, curators and gallery owners disdain the Beijing Biennale, they tend to view it as a harmless academic exercise rather than a cause for protest. Concurrent independent shows are a measure of Beijing's artistic evolution, they say, not a Salon des Refusés. Nonetheless, the difference is striking.

Cutting-edge Chinese art can be seen in central Beijing at the long-established Courtyard Gallery, next to the Forbidden City, and the Red Gate Gallery, in the historic Dongbianmen Watchtower. But the greatest concentration of galleries and studios is on the northeast side of the city. A boomtown of contemporary art has grown up in and around a rambling complex designed to manufacture munitions, now known as Factory 798 or the Dashanzi Art District.

Located just off an intersection of heavily trafficked thoroughfares, near the highway to the airport, 798 is a low-lying village of gray brick buildings reached by dusty pathways and narrow roads. Galleries are sprinkled throughout the complex, along with a well-stocked art book store and a few boutiques, interior design shops and restaurants — including Vincent's, a popular hangout offering pizza, crepes, Chinese wine and an international selection of beer. A work in progress that is still home to a few small manufacturing plants, 798 has spawned several other artists' villages and exhibition spaces nearby.

Exhibition openings attract large crowds of observers and artists in fashionably casual attire, often puffing on cigarettes. During regular hours, an international stream of curators, collectors and critics flows through the galleries. The scene is largely populated by art world insiders, but reviews of the shows appear in a few newspapers and magazines.

"Convergence," an international group show organized by three curators, opened the fall gallery season, filling the Dayaolu Workshop, a vast, high-ceilinged space with dirt floors and vestiges of old machinery at the 798 complex, and two large galleries in the relatively new and pristine East End Art Zone A, a few miles away. Described as "a kind of cultural globalization" by chief curator Feng Boyi, the exhibition addressed environmental issues and explored other changes — real and imagined — brought by modernization.

As visitors wandered through the romantically grungy Dayaolu Workshop, where sunlight struggles to filter through the dirt on lofty windows, they found Wang Shugang's conceptual sculpture of tiny people walking on circuit boards in tented structures and Xu Zhongmin's figures tumbling off conveyor belts in long tubes. Zhu Jinshi's mixed-media installation, "The Great Wall Highway Plan," transformed China's historic barrier into a superhighway with sweeping interchanges. An installation by Zhuang Hui re-created the horrifyingly cramped quarters occupied by some victims of the Cultural Revolution but suggested that freedom has brought a regrettable loss of camaraderie.

Ai Wei Wei — best known for imbuing old objects with new life by rejiggering antique furniture, recycling beams from ancient temples and coating Neolithic pots with industrial paint — showed a series of photographs tracking the dwindling value of $100 as it was exchanged, with standard fees, from one nation's currency to another and another. High on one wall, where painted slogans once exhorted factory laborers to work harder, sculptor Sui Jianguo hung a red fluorescent sign spelling out "Made in China."

Among participants from other countries, Belgian Wim Delvoye installed two pens of tattooed pigs who rooted around in straw at one end of the exhibition space. Part of his "Art Farm," a project in a village north of Beijing conceived as a critique of human desires, the pigs sported Louis Vuitton logos and other images related to commercial products and social ambitions.

Photographer Sze Tsung Leong, who was born in Mexico City, spent much of his youth in California and lives in New York, showed works from his "History Images" series depicting Chinese cities in the process of destruction and re-creation. The artist calls these pictures "records of cities in time, in the process of perishing, disappearing, or starting anew." Another photographer, Xing Danwen of Beijing, unveiled her new "Urban Fictions," based on models of real estate developments in China. Casting the buildings in dramatic light and setting them up as backdrops for narratives, she inserted tiny images of herself gazing off balconies or scaring away intruders.

Art in China has come a long way from the official Socialist Realism of the Cultural Revolution — and artistic reactions to it that emerged after the death of Communist Party founder Mao Tse-tung.

"The artists have moved away from grand topics about changing society to individual issues and identity," said Uli Sigg, who has built one of the world's largest collections of Chinese contemporary art, made from the 1970s to the present. A former Swiss ambassador to China who is deputy chairman of Ringier Holding AG, Switzerland's largest media company, Sigg recently showed about 300 examples from his 1,200-piece holding at the Museum of Fine Arts in Berne.

Artists who once struggled against a repressive government now deal with pressures of the marketplace. As the gallery scene has exploded in the past few years, artists who once had trouble selling their works for a few hundred dollars rush to keep up with the demand for pieces priced in the thousands.

Not everyone has abandoned pressing social issues. Liu Xiaodong paints people caught up in dramatic social and physical transitions, such as the building of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River — examples of which will be shown at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco next spring. The speed and psychic cost of change is the subject of many contemporary Chinese artworks. But much of the art in Beijing galleries — particularly that of the younger generation — supports Sigg's point.

Emergence of the avant-garde

The most talked-about show in the 798 complex — Song Dong's installation "Waste Not" — is profoundly personal but strikes a universal chord. On view at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, a branch of Japan's Tokyo Gallery, the exhibition is a collaboration of the artist and his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan. Conceived as a way to assuage grief over the death of Song's father, Zhao's husband, it also illuminates a basic guideline for Chinese people born long before the new prosperity: Save everything that can possibly be of use, whether you need it or not.

Song said that his mother suffered an emotional breakdown and took her "waste not" habit to new extremes after her husband's death. He decided that the way to help her was to turn all the stuff she had hoarded into art. The shopping bags, shoes, socks, sweaters, hats, plastic bottles, water basins, garden tools, clay pots, soda cans, Thermos jars, lumber, stuffed toys, bars of soap, magazines and books would become components of an artwork that would reflect her history and that of her generation.

Part of the roof and beams of her former house stand in the middle of the gallery, surrounded by neat bundles, stacks and rows of her belongings. Forming a sort of memorial to the Chinese need to save, remnants of daily life cover the entire floor of the gallery — except for pathways that allow visitors to wander through the installation and think about the meaning of all that stuff.

"Here, my mother plays the role of the artist," Song said. "I am her assistant. Organizing her things and reconstructing her old house has brought her happiness. Our collaboration is a medium for art and a new start in our lives."

Critic Li Xian Ting, a highly regarded, independent writer who is an expert on the emergence of the Chinese avant-garde, has watched the evolution of the contemporary art scene and the development of works such as "Waste Not" with keen interest.

"Chinese art is like Chinese society," he said at his home on the outskirts of Beijing. "It is changing so fast. The new generation is wiping out the old. Before 1995, it was clear that the art was very Chinese; it reflected the development of China. After that it became a big melting pot with the West; anything goes."

Li likens today's Chinese art to three-legged ancient bronze vessels, known as tings. One leg is traditional Chinese art, such as ink painting, which continues to be taught at academies. The second is based on Western styles, such as Impressionism. The third, seen in cutting-edge work, is open to ideas from the West and new developments in China.

"The three forces coexist, but never cross over," he said. "The one least supported by the government is the cutting edge. But the government has to allow it to be shown to prove they are open. They are beginning to understand the PR value of recognition for contemporary art."

But with official tolerance, expanding outlets and a rapidly growing market, will Chinese contemporary art retain the political edge and national focus that distinguishes it from new art of other countries?

It's a question that intrigues Sigg, who makes a habit of asking artists, "Is there such a thing as Chinese-ness? If so, what is it? Are you making use of it? Are you purposely avoiding it?" Some dismiss the questions as ridiculous. Others answer in conflicting ways. "It's very controversial," he said. "There is no consensus on this issue."

Their art creates the scene

"In China, contemporary art can never be separated from politics," said art critic Li Xian Ting. "Now it embodies the values of a changing society, a capitalist society." Even so, artists in Beijing, as everywhere, are distinctive individuals with particular viewpoints and modes of expression.

Ai Wei Wei

This larger-than-life figure, who runs a splendidly pristine studio, a messy workshop, a bare-bones architecture office and an elegant gallery, often tweaks the notion of respect for the past by destroying and reworking old furniture, buildings and pottery.

Xing Danwen

A photographer who shot her first pictures at the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Xing has taken portraits of Chinese coal miners and documented villages where electronic trash is recycled. In her newest work, "Urban Fiction Series," she has focused on Beijing's raging real estate market.

Liu Xiaodong

Liu is a passionate and energetic figurative painter who examines human and environmental costs of massive change in China. Having probed generational tensions in families and united portraits of military adversaries in past works, he is chronicling the devastation caused by building the Three Gorges Dam.

Yu Hong

Yu, a painter and social observer who has documented her life in terms of China's political history, pairs figurative compositions with enlarged news photographs or snapshots of people. One of her latest works features a cheery Chinese real estate agent overlooking a sparkling model of a Western-style development.

Sui Jianguo

The chairman of the sculpture department at the Central Academy of Art, Sui has built a widely acclaimed body of work that uses ideological and stylistic components of Socialist Realism to address conflicts between freedom and restraint in contemporary China.

[image] The big top (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times)
[image] Here and there (Du yingnan / Imaginechina For The Times)
[image] Capitalist pigs (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times)
[image] The official banner (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times)
[image] Ponder this (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times)

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-beijing16oct16,2,30223.story

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

__________________________________________

An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is
available at:
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html
For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to:
http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm


	October 22, 2005: [achtung! kunst] China as a gallery of contrasts

	Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2005 China as a gallery of contrasts The conventional and the cutting-edge jostle for prominence as art spins off an exploding culture. By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer Beijing — The first of two articles on the burgeoning art scene in China. An enormous bald fiberglass nude by Chinese sculptor Xiang Jing sits heavily on a pink bench in a room of her own, staring glumly into space. Smaller, life-size figures lined up in an adjacent space at China Art Seasons gallery seem to be gripped by anxiety. Petulant, grim or wary, they are on the move but lost in some internal crisis. One young woman sticks two fingers in her mouth, as if stifling a scream. In another work, three dark-suited figures merge into a bundle of nervous energy. This is contemporary art in China, or at least one aspect of it. In the capital of China, where a new Great Wall of high-rise apartments encircles the city and billboards advertise Western-style residential developments called Napa Valley, Upper East Side and Vancouver Forest, the contemporary art scene reflects the dynamic, weirdly conflicted side of life here. Overseas investors and newly rich Chinese fund more and more trendy galleries. Brand-new artworks depicting subjects that would have been banned a few decades ago sell for tens of thousands of dollars — and much more at auction a few years later. Jet-setting artists with lots of studio assistants own fashionable restaurants and send their children to private schools. "The speed of the economy brings opportunities for artists," said Li Guosheng, a Chinese businessman who opened Chinablue Gallery in Beijing three years ago and has engaged superstar artist Ai Wei Wei to design his second commercial outlet for Chinese contemporary art. "The artists' success is comparable to economic growth in China." But Beijing is also a city of sharp contrasts between rich and poor, old and new, government control and free enterprise. The art scene reflects that divergence as well, and never more so than this fall. The Beijing International Art Biennale, an enormous state-sponsored exhibition at the Millennium Monument Art Museum and the National Art Museum, is billed as "the largest international art gathering ever held in China." But it's merely a backdrop for a batch of far more adventurous shows in independent galleries. Despite stunning growth in Shanghai and other cities in China, Beijing remains the nation's cultural center and hub of art production. But it didn't launch its Biennale until 2003 — long after such international extravaganzas popped up in other cities around the world — and the show doesn't follow the art world model. The organizers seem to have no interest in promoting Beijing as a place to see forward-looking art. A statement posted at the two museums and printed in the Biennale catalog explains that the art was chosen to illustrate "humanistic concerns" and encourage "harmony between art and the public, harmony between people and harmony between man and nature." Assembled by a committee to end all committees — composed of 58 directors, curators, advisors and coordinators working in consultation with a host of embassies and art organizations — the exhibition represents 462 artists from 69 countries in a public display of openness. But it's almost entirely restricted to painting and sculpture, excluding the photography, video, new media and installation preferred by many young artists. The result is a mélange of traditional art and reworkings of modern styles, lightly sprinkled with works by leading avant-garde Chinese artists and teachers, such as Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, and internationally renowned figures including German painters Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. In an apparent attempt to cover all bases, the organizers added small shows of contemporary art from Italy, Russia and Uzbekistan; a roundup of French Impressionist prints; a spotty survey of European and American art called "From Ingres to Warhol"; and a tribute to the late traditional Chinese painter Huang Zhou, on view in adjacent rooms. "It's a very strange show, but very Chinese," said Yu, whose painting "She — A Peasant in the Suburbs" looks rather out of place in such conventional company. Part of a series of diptychs on Chinese women, it pairs an image of an elderly woman working out on an exercise machine with a portrayal of her fully dressed but up to her waist in water. "I hoped they would choose one of my new works," Yu said, "but they took the same painting that was at the Shanghai Biennale last year." Dismissed as an academic exercise While many artists, curators and gallery owners disdain the Beijing Biennale, they tend to view it as a harmless academic exercise rather than a cause for protest. Concurrent independent shows are a measure of Beijing's artistic evolution, they say, not a Salon des Refusés. Nonetheless, the difference is striking. Cutting-edge Chinese art can be seen in central Beijing at the long-established Courtyard Gallery, next to the Forbidden City, and the Red Gate Gallery, in the historic Dongbianmen Watchtower. But the greatest concentration of galleries and studios is on the northeast side of the city. A boomtown of contemporary art has grown up in and around a rambling complex designed to manufacture munitions, now known as Factory 798 or the Dashanzi Art District. Located just off an intersection of heavily trafficked thoroughfares, near the highway to the airport, 798 is a low-lying village of gray brick buildings reached by dusty pathways and narrow roads. Galleries are sprinkled throughout the complex, along with a well-stocked art book store and a few boutiques, interior design shops and restaurants — including Vincent's, a popular hangout offering pizza, crepes, Chinese wine and an international selection of beer. A work in progress that is still home to a few small manufacturing plants, 798 has spawned several other artists' villages and exhibition spaces nearby. Exhibition openings attract large crowds of observers and artists in fashionably casual attire, often puffing on cigarettes. During regular hours, an international stream of curators, collectors and critics flows through the galleries. The scene is largely populated by art world insiders, but reviews of the shows appear in a few newspapers and magazines. "Convergence," an international group show organized by three curators, opened the fall gallery season, filling the Dayaolu Workshop, a vast, high-ceilinged space with dirt floors and vestiges of old machinery at the 798 complex, and two large galleries in the relatively new and pristine East End Art Zone A, a few miles away. Described as "a kind of cultural globalization" by chief curator Feng Boyi, the exhibition addressed environmental issues and explored other changes — real and imagined — brought by modernization. As visitors wandered through the romantically grungy Dayaolu Workshop, where sunlight struggles to filter through the dirt on lofty windows, they found Wang Shugang's conceptual sculpture of tiny people walking on circuit boards in tented structures and Xu Zhongmin's figures tumbling off conveyor belts in long tubes. Zhu Jinshi's mixed-media installation, "The Great Wall Highway Plan," transformed China's historic barrier into a superhighway with sweeping interchanges. An installation by Zhuang Hui re-created the horrifyingly cramped quarters occupied by some victims of the Cultural Revolution but suggested that freedom has brought a regrettable loss of camaraderie. Ai Wei Wei — best known for imbuing old objects with new life by rejiggering antique furniture, recycling beams from ancient temples and coating Neolithic pots with industrial paint — showed a series of photographs tracking the dwindling value of $100 as it was exchanged, with standard fees, from one nation's currency to another and another. High on one wall, where painted slogans once exhorted factory laborers to work harder, sculptor Sui Jianguo hung a red fluorescent sign spelling out "Made in China." Among participants from other countries, Belgian Wim Delvoye installed two pens of tattooed pigs who rooted around in straw at one end of the exhibition space. Part of his "Art Farm," a project in a village north of Beijing conceived as a critique of human desires, the pigs sported Louis Vuitton logos and other images related to commercial products and social ambitions. Photographer Sze Tsung Leong, who was born in Mexico City, spent much of his youth in California and lives in New York, showed works from his "History Images" series depicting Chinese cities in the process of destruction and re-creation. The artist calls these pictures "records of cities in time, in the process of perishing, disappearing, or starting anew." Another photographer, Xing Danwen of Beijing, unveiled her new "Urban Fictions," based on models of real estate developments in China. Casting the buildings in dramatic light and setting them up as backdrops for narratives, she inserted tiny images of herself gazing off balconies or scaring away intruders. Art in China has come a long way from the official Socialist Realism of the Cultural Revolution — and artistic reactions to it that emerged after the death of Communist Party founder Mao Tse-tung. "The artists have moved away from grand topics about changing society to individual issues and identity," said Uli Sigg, who has built one of the world's largest collections of Chinese contemporary art, made from the 1970s to the present. A former Swiss ambassador to China who is deputy chairman of Ringier Holding AG, Switzerland's largest media company, Sigg recently showed about 300 examples from his 1,200-piece holding at the Museum of Fine Arts in Berne. Artists who once struggled against a repressive government now deal with pressures of the marketplace. As the gallery scene has exploded in the past few years, artists who once had trouble selling their works for a few hundred dollars rush to keep up with the demand for pieces priced in the thousands. Not everyone has abandoned pressing social issues. Liu Xiaodong paints people caught up in dramatic social and physical transitions, such as the building of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River — examples of which will be shown at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco next spring. The speed and psychic cost of change is the subject of many contemporary Chinese artworks. But much of the art in Beijing galleries — particularly that of the younger generation — supports Sigg's point. Emergence of the avant-garde The most talked-about show in the 798 complex — Song Dong's installation "Waste Not" — is profoundly personal but strikes a universal chord. On view at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, a branch of Japan's Tokyo Gallery, the exhibition is a collaboration of the artist and his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan. Conceived as a way to assuage grief over the death of Song's father, Zhao's husband, it also illuminates a basic guideline for Chinese people born long before the new prosperity: Save everything that can possibly be of use, whether you need it or not. Song said that his mother suffered an emotional breakdown and took her "waste not" habit to new extremes after her husband's death. He decided that the way to help her was to turn all the stuff she had hoarded into art. The shopping bags, shoes, socks, sweaters, hats, plastic bottles, water basins, garden tools, clay pots, soda cans, Thermos jars, lumber, stuffed toys, bars of soap, magazines and books would become components of an artwork that would reflect her history and that of her generation. Part of the roof and beams of her former house stand in the middle of the gallery, surrounded by neat bundles, stacks and rows of her belongings. Forming a sort of memorial to the Chinese need to save, remnants of daily life cover the entire floor of the gallery — except for pathways that allow visitors to wander through the installation and think about the meaning of all that stuff. "Here, my mother plays the role of the artist," Song said. "I am her assistant. Organizing her things and reconstructing her old house has brought her happiness. Our collaboration is a medium for art and a new start in our lives." Critic Li Xian Ting, a highly regarded, independent writer who is an expert on the emergence of the Chinese avant-garde, has watched the evolution of the contemporary art scene and the development of works such as "Waste Not" with keen interest. "Chinese art is like Chinese society," he said at his home on the outskirts of Beijing. "It is changing so fast. The new generation is wiping out the old. Before 1995, it was clear that the art was very Chinese; it reflected the development of China. After that it became a big melting pot with the West; anything goes." Li likens today's Chinese art to three-legged ancient bronze vessels, known as tings. One leg is traditional Chinese art, such as ink painting, which continues to be taught at academies. The second is based on Western styles, such as Impressionism. The third, seen in cutting-edge work, is open to ideas from the West and new developments in China. "The three forces coexist, but never cross over," he said. "The one least supported by the government is the cutting edge. But the government has to allow it to be shown to prove they are open. They are beginning to understand the PR value of recognition for contemporary art." But with official tolerance, expanding outlets and a rapidly growing market, will Chinese contemporary art retain the political edge and national focus that distinguishes it from new art of other countries? It's a question that intrigues Sigg, who makes a habit of asking artists, "Is there such a thing as Chinese-ness? If so, what is it? Are you making use of it? Are you purposely avoiding it?" Some dismiss the questions as ridiculous. Others answer in conflicting ways. "It's very controversial," he said. "There is no consensus on this issue." Their art creates the scene "In China, contemporary art can never be separated from politics," said art critic Li Xian Ting. "Now it embodies the values of a changing society, a capitalist society." Even so, artists in Beijing, as everywhere, are distinctive individuals with particular viewpoints and modes of expression. Ai Wei Wei This larger-than-life figure, who runs a splendidly pristine studio, a messy workshop, a bare-bones architecture office and an elegant gallery, often tweaks the notion of respect for the past by destroying and reworking old furniture, buildings and pottery. Xing Danwen A photographer who shot her first pictures at the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Xing has taken portraits of Chinese coal miners and documented villages where electronic trash is recycled. In her newest work, "Urban Fiction Series," she has focused on Beijing's raging real estate market. Liu Xiaodong Liu is a passionate and energetic figurative painter who examines human and environmental costs of massive change in China. Having probed generational tensions in families and united portraits of military adversaries in past works, he is chronicling the devastation caused by building the Three Gorges Dam. Yu Hong Yu, a painter and social observer who has documented her life in terms of China's political history, pairs figurative compositions with enlarged news photographs or snapshots of people. One of her latest works features a cheery Chinese real estate agent overlooking a sparkling model of a Western-style development. Sui Jianguo The chairman of the sculpture department at the Central Academy of Art, Sui has built a widely acclaimed body of work that uses ideological and stylistic components of Socialist Realism to address conflicts between freedom and restraint in contemporary China. [image] The big top (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times) [image] Here and there (Du yingnan / Imaginechina For The Times) [image] Capitalist pigs (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times) [image] The official banner (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times) [image] Ponder this (Ji guoqiang / Imaginechina For The Times) http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-beijing16oct16,2,30223.story __________________ with kind regards, Matthias Arnold (Art-Eastasia list) http://www.chinaresource.org http://www.fluktor.de __________________________________________ An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is available at: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to: http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm